Christopher Ouma: On Black archival imagination | Institute for Humanities in Africa

Ataya: HUMA Interdisciplinary Seminar Series

Speaker: Christopher Ouma, Duke University

Bio: Christopher Ouma is research affiliate of the department of English Literary Studies at UCT. He holds a Doctorate from the Department of African Literature at University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He is Associate Professor in the Duke English Department. He has previously held the position of Associate Dean of Research at the University of Cape Town, as well as a joint appointment between the Departments of English and African Studies. His research and teaching interests include the broader field of contemporary African and African Diasporic literary and cultural production. He is interested in African popular culture, Black archives and Black print cultures, particularly small magazines, literary journals and literary periodicals and Pan-African imagination and is working on a monograph and an edited collection on these topics. He is the author of Childhood in Contemporary Diasporic Africa Literature: Memories and Futures Past (2020) and co-editor of Spoken Word Project: Stories travelling through Africa (2014). Christopher has won various awards and held fellowships at UCT, the Open University London, University of the Johannesburg as well as at the W.E.B Du Bois Institute at Harvard University’s Hutchins Centre. Until 2023 he was co-editor of the Journal Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies.

Topic: Imperial experiences, varied as they have been across space and time, inherently impinge upon attempts to retrieve, engage and preserve the Black archive. This project examines how Black experiences have posed problems with regards to how they have been represented as they have encountered enslavement, imperialism and apartheid. The project examines how Black engagements have complicated what the archive is and what its material and generic manifestations are. Springing from the assumption that student protests that began at UCT posed significant questions about the archive and the epistemological conditions rising from it, we deploy Black Archival Imagination as a platform, an assemblage that draws genealogies and solidarities between (South) Africa and the Black Diaspora. Black Archival Imagination reads Black Archives as not just endangered, erased and constantly under the threat of incorporation into a global order of neo-liberal capitalism, but as creating conditions of possibility – what Gary Wilder elsewhere calls ‘Concrete Utopianism’: reading the past for the possibilities in our present with the view for alternative futures.

How Ataya works: One presenter and their work – in exchange with the audience. Each Ataya session engages with selected work by the presenter (a text, artwork, performance, even food). The presenter introduces their work and grounds the subsequent discussion with the participants. For best engagement, we recommend participants to view the work (made available in advance on our website) before the session.